In a first of its kind
experiment in the world, Union Minister of Human Resource Development
Mr. Kapil Sibal today inaugurated the 10,000 teacher training programme
conducted by IIT Bombay under the ‘Talk to a Teacher’ project of the
National Mission on Education through Information and Communication
Technology (NME-ICT) of the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
Training for 10,000 engineering college teachers from across the country
is being conducted leveraging the broadband network and ICT tools.

This training programme is conducted through 168 remote centres located
all across India. The lectures in this course are delivered from IIT
Bombay by Professors of IIT Bombay and IIT Madras. Through the software
A-VIEW, audio-video connectivity is provided between all the centres and
IIT Bombay. The course consists of lectures, live interactions and lab
sessions.

This method of synchronous education has been developed at IIT Bombay,
under the leadership of Prof. D. B. Phatak. This method of education
allows allows participation of a large number of women teachers, who
normally are unable to join contact programmes at distant locations,
owing to family commitments.

The Minister interacted with the remote centres from Kanyakumari,
Rajkot, Srinagar and Nagpur. A representative of IIT Bombay symbolically
presented an Aakash Tablet to the Minister. The Minister suggested that
the IIT Bombay Director Prof. Devang Khakhar present Aakash devices to
the Heads of a few institutions which host the remote centres of the
10,000 teacher training programme.

The Minister said that he was happy that the Aakash project has picked
up speed and is ready for release. Unlike other tablet devices, Aakash
can also be used to create computer programs, in Python, C, C++ and
Scilab, for example.

In addition to being a computer, Aakash will also be an access device,
in applications, such as e-governance. The Minister thanked IIT Bombay
for doing a wonderful job porting many useful software on to Aakash.

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